New 'Cloud Atlas' Trailer Features Many Different Tom Hanks (Video)

The multi-story film from the Wachowskis offers a shorter, but more detailed, look at its complicated arc.

It's hard to know exactly what is happening in the new trailer for Andy and Lana Wachowski's Cloud Atlas, but two things are immediately clear: it's going to be epic, and it's going to contain a whole lot of Tom Hanks.

The Matrix filmmakers' adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 massive tome will feature its talented, Oscar-laden cast playing a multitude of roles, an idea the filmmakers conceived of as a solution to illustrating that the movie focused on souls, which can move around to different bodies over time. Along with Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon and Jim Broadbent play a number of different parts.

"Cloud Atlas is a twenty-first-century novel,” Lana Wachowski told The New Yorker this week. "It represents a midpoint between the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end."

The film, which after much volleying hit a $100 million or so budget, is set for theaters in October.